The journalist was a damned fool for not realizing that a file on the web could be downloaded by anybody,...
He was told it was a temporary file that was supposed to be deleted in a few hours. The fact that it was not and that it was made part of a torrent were Wikileak failures.
... and in the case of a Wikileaks server, any file there for more than a minute or two was virtually certain to be downloaded by a number of intelligence agencies and shady characters on the off chance that the key would eventually turn up.
Your tin foil hat is on a bit tight. If an intelligence agency wanted the data it would be far more likely they would simply target a newspaper that already had the unredacted data. That was a known opportunity. What you offer is a pretty unlikely opportunity.
Or, in little words for little minds: data can be copied. Publicly posted data can be copied by anybody.
Like the decrypted archives in the hands of various news agencies involved in the redaction effort. Another failure of wikileaks data handling, an example of wikileaks surrendering control. Once wikileaks made the data available to others it was likely to be exposed. They should have done the redaction in-house, if journalists wanted to see unredacted documents they should have visited wikileaks.
Wikileaks gave unredacted data to outsiders. Wikileaks fail.
So, to be short, Assange was too condescending by asking the journalist if he would remember the password but not condescending enough when he thought the journalist could understand that a password is supposed to be kept as secret as the content it protects ?
No. He asked the journalist to remember a single missing word omitted from the pass phrase being written down. Also the journalist believed the password was obsolete, that the content was to be removed from the wikileaks server in a few hours. In short that there was no longer any archive to protect. Yes the journalist was quite silly thinking that Assange would follow through on this basic task and that Assange was not silly enough to reuse this password for other archives.
Condescending? This is the word you use to describe the attitude toward the guy who told the password to the world?
Yes, condescending, he asked a journalist if he could remember the missing word in a sentence.
Regarding, "told the password", at a much later date he shared the mildly obfuscated sentence used as a password on an archive he was told was temporary and would be deleted in a few hours. How would the journalist know this was not true or that Assange was using his favorite sentence as the password for other archives as well. At worst you can accuse the journalist of making the mistake of assuming Assange was competent with respect to data security.
Here's an Amazon book review critical of the disclosure of the password in the book. I registered my support for the critique with a 'helpful' click.
Did you think that through? If you get this review marked as the top negative review it will plainly tell everyone the real world password is in there and probably generate far more curiosity than outrage.
What's new in Schneier's article is that that is pretty clearly debunked. This was a standard GPG/PGP archive which had already been distributed.
Nothing is clearly debunked. My understanding is that the file given to the Guardian was something put together just for them, a temporary archive that would be deleted from the WikiLeaks system within hours - or so they were told. They had no reason to believe that Assange was reusing passwords and that a more permanent archive was using the same one.
There was absolutely no reason to hand out the correct password and doing so is a clear breach of IT security norms (never give your password to anybody) for no good reason.
Actually the password did have some newsworthiness. The password itself provided some insight into Assange's thinking and his condescending attitude towards journalists was also insightful (can you remember this missing word). Also, showing how a relatively weak password (dictionary words, domain specific, etc.) was being used for such critical data was also insightful. Perhaps as Assange wants to embarrass the US government into good actions the Guardian wanted to embarrass Assange into using good passwords.
... was the blame on Assange who apparently reused a password...
Essentially the blame is on Assange. The Guardian had no knowledge that Assange was reusing passwords, they were told by Assange this was a password for a temporary file that will be deleted in a few hours. The Guardian shares blame to the extent that they assumed Assange was competent at data security.
Actually it was kind of interesting. The password itself provides some insight into Assange's thinking and the interaction between the journalist and Assange was insightful in that Assange demonstrates great contempt (can you remember this missing word).
They were thinking... that The Guardian had already published the password to the "insurance" file in a book so they might as well let everybody have access, not just the bad guys.
My understanding is that the Guardian did not publish the password to the insurance file, that it published the password to a temporary file that Assange said would only exist for a few hours. The password was interesting in that it provides some insight into Assange's thinking. Assange giving the password to the Guardian was also insightful, demonstrating great contempt for journalists (can you remember this missing word).
What the Guardian did not know, and what Assange is greatly negligent and responsible for is the recycling/reuse of the password for other files and/or the failure to delete the temporary file. This is terribly amateurish handling of extremely critical data.
Not necessarily. Leaking is also a tool of embarrassment, harassment, political manipulation, etc. When leaking selectively, one side and not the other, the point may be entirely political.
I'll be brief, although it's hard to not attack the ridiculous notion that Democrats are somehow to blame for poverty with mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Care to address the point actually made rather than the straw man you just manufactured? To refresh your recollection:
"... the democrat's 40-something year war on poverty which has done nothing? It's regulation often criticized as having the unintended consequence of contributing to the decay of the family in low income neighborhoods."
Here is something to help you jump start your research. Poverty levels were in sharp decline prior to LBJ's programs. At about the time they took effect poverty levels stabilized and have essentially remained unchanged.
Or were you confused by the "democrat / share croppers" statement? You might want to re-read and notice it was clearly labeled as political hyperbole matching the "conservative / desperate peasants" statement of the GP.
The game here in "The Land of Opportunity" is getting increasingly rigged, like some ugly game of king of the hill, where the middle class is increasingly being squeezed into (relative) poverty --and it ain't because of people excited to get on welfare.
The point of my post a few levels up is to point out that this rigging of the game also comes from the manipulations of the market/system by well meaning politicians oblivious to side effects and unintended consequences, caring more for the good intentions and warm feelings of regulations or legislation and not so much for the effectiveness of the regulations or legislation. For example the current economic crisis. I realize it feels good to blame it all on banks and wall street but reality is that government also had a hand in the lowering of lending requirements, consumers also exhibited a greed component by purchasing larger homes than they should have, etc. Reality is not quite as simple as you seem to be suggesting.
Did it occur to you that any nation capable of doing in the future will have ballistic missiles and the ability to create nuclear weapons? And that any nation capable of doing this today has large stockpiles of both?
Did it occur to you that rocks from space can avoid many of the nasty side effects of nuclear weapons, say radiation? Think of it as a more environmentally friendly WMD. You can take out the city or military base and still use the adjoining farm lands.
The majority of your standard US conservatives LOVE the idea of charity because it lets them off the hook. If charity worked, we wouldn't have invented taxes.
Charity worked quite well until displaced / squeezed out by the government. Charities have the benefit of being more aware and adapted to the local circumstances. They often target the root cause of the problem more effectively due to this and they certainly can deliver a greater portion of donation dollars to the needy than government tax dollars collected for charitable work. For example the salvation army and other church groups providing more effective care than the city sponsored homeless shelter.
Government encroachment into charitable works is just a form of campaigning for votes. It was not done of necessity. There is one key exception, large scale disaster. Under such circumstances the local givers and providers may be affected.
Conservatives actually differ from liberals only in how best to assist the less fortunate. There is a false perception that they care less because they are less tolerant of ideas that feel good or feel right but actually accomplish little.
Like the idea that if we cut taxes on billionaires even more, jobs will follow? Conservatives seem pretty "tolerant" of that bit of magical thinking.
Billionaires will simply engineer their activities to avoid taxes. For example look at presidential adviser Warren Buffet. He evades income by tax being paid in stock and he evade inheritance tax by putting his money in trusts.
So when they oppose an idea that has the best of intentions, not because they disagree with the goal but because they think the idea is flawed, they "look bad".
No. They look bad because their policies fail, over and over again, to the point where any reasonable person might start to suspect that "assist[ing] the less fortunate" is not actually on the conservative agenda. To be fair, it depends on how you define failure: if your goal is a nation full of desperate peasants who will work themselves to death for scraps from the nobility's table, conservative policies are a resounding success.
Policy failures like the democrat's 40-something year war on poverty which has done nothing? It's regulation often criticized as having the unintended consequence of contributing to the decay of the family in low income neighborhoods. Creating a whole class of people who are dependent on their wise and charitable politicians who ask for nothing in return other than their votes. The democrats have created a modern version of share cropping, trapping people in their circumstances. -- See people can play silly political word games on both sides of the political fence. The preceding statement and your statement are both political tripe.
Social justice means recognizing that all men were not born with equal opportunity. It's a notion which conservatives tend to ignore...
That is not a factual statement. Conservatives actually differ from liberals only in how best to assist the less fortunate. There is a false perception that they care less because they are less tolerant of ideas that feel good or feel right but actually accomplish little. So when they oppose an idea that has the best of intentions, not because they disagree with the goal but because they think the idea is flawed, they "look bad". This gets amplified by a media that is generally in the feels good / feels right camp.
Religions are not merely spiritual. They are often the means by which communities have passed on knowledge applicable to survival. If an indigenous culture says that a particular plant is important because of the influence of a god or goddess would you ignore the plant or would you consider it something to investigate from a chemical / pharmacological perspective?
Who said keep the flat earth reference? I actually asked why would the entire book be tossed out because of the flat earth reference, rather than evaluate each thing in the book on its own merits.
Regarding changing religious teaching we have one pretty large religion that went from the universe is six thousand year old camp to the being a major cosmological researcher, even having one of its priests being the author of the big bang theory. I'd add that some of the so called open minded scientists of the day initially dismissed this cosmological origin theory merely because it was authored by a priest and smelled of creationism.
I think you are confusing zealotry with religion. Zealotry may sometimes be found with religion but it is something that is quite independent and sometime exhibited by the non religious.
Until you can provide some evidence that your beneficial scenario actually occurred in the real world, and that it is more likely to occur than a dangerous one, you are not being rational, you are being religious.
You are mistaken. Prohibitions against eating a particular species in a particular region occur today. For example in much of the US deer are safe to eat. However in certain regions the scientists and doctors tell hunters not to eat the local deer due to a high likelihood of parasite/disease.
The rules may be overly broad (fins and scales) but in a survival manual rules sometimes need to be simple to facilitate memory. Even today we do this, consider the "leaves of three" rule we use for poison ivy and such. Surely this rule is overly broad and includes species that are not harmful.
FWIW, rabbits can be dangerous in the extreme (regular rabbits, not just Monty Python's killer rabbits). They lack certain nutrients and excessive consumption can lead to malnutrition.
Regarding thriving while violating these OT rules. You seem to be referring to populations in Europe and Asia. I specifically stated the OT was a local survival manual. As another poster has pointed out, if you look at the people who thrived in that specific region of the world they did adhere to OT type of rules. Even today in the US deer are safe to eat in many regions, but in some regions scientists and doctors tell hunters not to eat the local deer because of a common local parasite or disease.
The modern scientific industrial process is to inspect for and discard contaminated meat. The ancient religious practice is to avoid a species likely to be contaminated. I think the difference between these two approaches is not a matter of science, rather a matter of an industrial scale of production. The "prohibition" type of approach of ancient religions is still in use today by scientists and doctors when dealing with smaller scales. For example in certain parts of the US the hunters are told not to eat certain species because of problems with one type of parasite/disease or another.
When in town and picking up USDA inspected meat at the grocery a survival manual is not in mind. However when in a wilderness environment if I screw up and get lost then ancient religious teachings can become a little more relevant. You are quite mistaken about certain knowledge being without value, knowledge is knowledge even if it does not need to be applied every day.
Personally I think its more likely to be there to put the soldier at ease and make him move more quickly and be less fearful about using the weapon. Without such labeling there would be a lot more double and triple checking, and second guessing before actuating the device. Especially in the dark.
How does any of the above change the fact that *some* things in the bible [were] rational and well informed?
The problem is that once these "rational and well informed" rules become part of the religion they become dogma. They become holy words which must not be changed. It doesn't matter if it turns out they were wrong if the first place or if the situation changes. The reason dies and the prohibition lives.
Not necessarily. There are sometimes "reformed" churches who lighten up on rules given scientific progress. For example Reform Judaism believes that some "laws" are really guidelines subject to interpretation rather than literal adherence. On the Christian side you have one church that believes in literal interpretation and that the universe is six thousand or so years old while a different church does world class science in the field of astronomy and who has a priest that developed the big bang theory for the origin of the universe. I think the later (church not priest) once accepted something not far from the former with respect to the age of the universe.
Regarding the proposition that some non-religious people believe epidemics are punishment, yes that is true. A lunatic fringe of that population will say it is mother earth / nature punishing mankind for despoiling the earth.
I'm pretty sure anyone who believes that Mother Nature can punish mankind is religious. They may not be part of your religion, but if they really believe in Mother Nature then they are definitely religious.
To an extent I agree. I see many of the anti-religious posters around here displaying quite religious thought pattens and behaviors. However I think its really about zealotry not religion. A bible thumping fire and brimstone preacher ranting about the wickedness of man and an atheist radical environmental activist ranting about the evils of humanity are quite similar, merely having different polarities on the religiousness meter. While zealotry is often associated with religion I think it exists separately and is the true source of many problems, not religion itself. Many great thinkers and scientists were religious.
Slashdot Mirror
The journalist was a damned fool for not realizing that a file on the web could be downloaded by anybody, ...
He was told it was a temporary file that was supposed to be deleted in a few hours. The fact that it was not and that it was made part of a torrent were Wikileak failures.
Your tin foil hat is on a bit tight. If an intelligence agency wanted the data it would be far more likely they would simply target a newspaper that already had the unredacted data. That was a known opportunity. What you offer is a pretty unlikely opportunity.
Or, in little words for little minds: data can be copied. Publicly posted data can be copied by anybody.
Like the decrypted archives in the hands of various news agencies involved in the redaction effort. Another failure of wikileaks data handling, an example of wikileaks surrendering control. Once wikileaks made the data available to others it was likely to be exposed. They should have done the redaction in-house, if journalists wanted to see unredacted documents they should have visited wikileaks.
Wikileaks gave unredacted data to outsiders. Wikileaks fail.
So, to be short, Assange was too condescending by asking the journalist if he would remember the password but not condescending enough when he thought the journalist could understand that a password is supposed to be kept as secret as the content it protects ?
No. He asked the journalist to remember a single missing word omitted from the pass phrase being written down. Also the journalist believed the password was obsolete, that the content was to be removed from the wikileaks server in a few hours. In short that there was no longer any archive to protect. Yes the journalist was quite silly thinking that Assange would follow through on this basic task and that Assange was not silly enough to reuse this password for other archives.
Condescending? This is the word you use to describe the attitude toward the guy who told the password to the world?
Yes, condescending, he asked a journalist if he could remember the missing word in a sentence.
Regarding, "told the password", at a much later date he shared the mildly obfuscated sentence used as a password on an archive he was told was temporary and would be deleted in a few hours. How would the journalist know this was not true or that Assange was using his favorite sentence as the password for other archives as well. At worst you can accuse the journalist of making the mistake of assuming Assange was competent with respect to data security.
Here's an Amazon book review critical of the disclosure of the password in the book. I registered my support for the critique with a 'helpful' click.
Did you think that through? If you get this review marked as the top negative review it will plainly tell everyone the real world password is in there and probably generate far more curiosity than outrage.
What's new in Schneier's article is that that is pretty clearly debunked. This was a standard GPG/PGP archive which had already been distributed.
Nothing is clearly debunked. My understanding is that the file given to the Guardian was something put together just for them, a temporary archive that would be deleted from the WikiLeaks system within hours - or so they were told. They had no reason to believe that Assange was reusing passwords and that a more permanent archive was using the same one.
There was absolutely no reason to hand out the correct password and doing so is a clear breach of IT security norms (never give your password to anybody) for no good reason.
Actually the password did have some newsworthiness. The password itself provided some insight into Assange's thinking and his condescending attitude towards journalists was also insightful (can you remember this missing word). Also, showing how a relatively weak password (dictionary words, domain specific, etc.) was being used for such critical data was also insightful. Perhaps as Assange wants to embarrass the US government into good actions the Guardian wanted to embarrass Assange into using good passwords.
... was the blame on Assange who apparently reused a password ...
Essentially the blame is on Assange. The Guardian had no knowledge that Assange was reusing passwords, they were told by Assange this was a password for a temporary file that will be deleted in a few hours. The Guardian shares blame to the extent that they assumed Assange was competent at data security.
standard protocol to publish a source's password?
Actually it was kind of interesting. The password itself provides some insight into Assange's thinking and the interaction between the journalist and Assange was insightful in that Assange demonstrates great contempt (can you remember this missing word).
They were thinking ... that The Guardian had already published the password to the "insurance" file in a book so they might as well let everybody have access, not just the bad guys.
My understanding is that the Guardian did not publish the password to the insurance file, that it published the password to a temporary file that Assange said would only exist for a few hours. The password was interesting in that it provides some insight into Assange's thinking. Assange giving the password to the Guardian was also insightful, demonstrating great contempt for journalists (can you remember this missing word). What the Guardian did not know, and what Assange is greatly negligent and responsible for is the recycling/reuse of the password for other files and/or the failure to delete the temporary file. This is terribly amateurish handling of extremely critical data.
The point of leaking is to expose malfeasance.
Not necessarily. Leaking is also a tool of embarrassment, harassment, political manipulation, etc. When leaking selectively, one side and not the other, the point may be entirely political.
I'll be brief, although it's hard to not attack the ridiculous notion that Democrats are somehow to blame for poverty with mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Care to address the point actually made rather than the straw man you just manufactured? To refresh your recollection:
"... the democrat's 40-something year war on poverty which has done nothing? It's regulation often criticized as having the unintended consequence of contributing to the decay of the family in low income neighborhoods."
Here is something to help you jump start your research. Poverty levels were in sharp decline prior to LBJ's programs. At about the time they took effect poverty levels stabilized and have essentially remained unchanged.
Or were you confused by the "democrat / share croppers" statement? You might want to re-read and notice it was clearly labeled as political hyperbole matching the "conservative / desperate peasants" statement of the GP.
The game here in "The Land of Opportunity" is getting increasingly rigged, like some ugly game of king of the hill, where the middle class is increasingly being squeezed into (relative) poverty --and it ain't because of people excited to get on welfare.
The point of my post a few levels up is to point out that this rigging of the game also comes from the manipulations of the market/system by well meaning politicians oblivious to side effects and unintended consequences, caring more for the good intentions and warm feelings of regulations or legislation and not so much for the effectiveness of the regulations or legislation. For example the current economic crisis. I realize it feels good to blame it all on banks and wall street but reality is that government also had a hand in the lowering of lending requirements, consumers also exhibited a greed component by purchasing larger homes than they should have, etc. Reality is not quite as simple as you seem to be suggesting.
Did it occur to you that any nation capable of doing in the future will have ballistic missiles and the ability to create nuclear weapons? And that any nation capable of doing this today has large stockpiles of both?
Did it occur to you that rocks from space can avoid many of the nasty side effects of nuclear weapons, say radiation? Think of it as a more environmentally friendly WMD. You can take out the city or military base and still use the adjoining farm lands.
I don't suppose it occurred you that this technology is also a weapons system, a WMD class weapons system.
And by "M" you mean worldwide.
Not at all. The size of the "rock" can be selected to match the desired radius of devastation.
American consumers have made their choice a long time ago.
You left out the part about a loss of jobs in the US, American consumers are OK with that too.
I don't suppose it occurred you that this technology is also a weapons system, a WMD class weapons system.
The majority of your standard US conservatives LOVE the idea of charity because it lets them off the hook. If charity worked, we wouldn't have invented taxes.
Charity worked quite well until displaced / squeezed out by the government. Charities have the benefit of being more aware and adapted to the local circumstances. They often target the root cause of the problem more effectively due to this and they certainly can deliver a greater portion of donation dollars to the needy than government tax dollars collected for charitable work. For example the salvation army and other church groups providing more effective care than the city sponsored homeless shelter. Government encroachment into charitable works is just a form of campaigning for votes. It was not done of necessity. There is one key exception, large scale disaster. Under such circumstances the local givers and providers may be affected.
Conservatives actually differ from liberals only in how best to assist the less fortunate. There is a false perception that they care less because they are less tolerant of ideas that feel good or feel right but actually accomplish little.
Like the idea that if we cut taxes on billionaires even more, jobs will follow? Conservatives seem pretty "tolerant" of that bit of magical thinking.
Billionaires will simply engineer their activities to avoid taxes. For example look at presidential adviser Warren Buffet. He evades income by tax being paid in stock and he evade inheritance tax by putting his money in trusts.
So when they oppose an idea that has the best of intentions, not because they disagree with the goal but because they think the idea is flawed, they "look bad".
No. They look bad because their policies fail, over and over again, to the point where any reasonable person might start to suspect that "assist[ing] the less fortunate" is not actually on the conservative agenda. To be fair, it depends on how you define failure: if your goal is a nation full of desperate peasants who will work themselves to death for scraps from the nobility's table, conservative policies are a resounding success.
Policy failures like the democrat's 40-something year war on poverty which has done nothing? It's regulation often criticized as having the unintended consequence of contributing to the decay of the family in low income neighborhoods. Creating a whole class of people who are dependent on their wise and charitable politicians who ask for nothing in return other than their votes. The democrats have created a modern version of share cropping, trapping people in their circumstances. -- See people can play silly political word games on both sides of the political fence. The preceding statement and your statement are both political tripe.
Social justice means recognizing that all men were not born with equal opportunity. It's a notion which conservatives tend to ignore ...
That is not a factual statement. Conservatives actually differ from liberals only in how best to assist the less fortunate. There is a false perception that they care less because they are less tolerant of ideas that feel good or feel right but actually accomplish little. So when they oppose an idea that has the best of intentions, not because they disagree with the goal but because they think the idea is flawed, they "look bad". This gets amplified by a media that is generally in the feels good / feels right camp.
Religions are not merely spiritual. They are often the means by which communities have passed on knowledge applicable to survival. If an indigenous culture says that a particular plant is important because of the influence of a god or goddess would you ignore the plant or would you consider it something to investigate from a chemical / pharmacological perspective?
Who said keep the flat earth reference? I actually asked why would the entire book be tossed out because of the flat earth reference, rather than evaluate each thing in the book on its own merits.
Regarding changing religious teaching we have one pretty large religion that went from the universe is six thousand year old camp to the being a major cosmological researcher, even having one of its priests being the author of the big bang theory. I'd add that some of the so called open minded scientists of the day initially dismissed this cosmological origin theory merely because it was authored by a priest and smelled of creationism.
I think you are confusing zealotry with religion. Zealotry may sometimes be found with religion but it is something that is quite independent and sometime exhibited by the non religious.
Until you can provide some evidence that your beneficial scenario actually occurred in the real world, and that it is more likely to occur than a dangerous one, you are not being rational, you are being religious.
You are mistaken. Prohibitions against eating a particular species in a particular region occur today. For example in much of the US deer are safe to eat. However in certain regions the scientists and doctors tell hunters not to eat the local deer due to a high likelihood of parasite/disease.
The rules may be overly broad (fins and scales) but in a survival manual rules sometimes need to be simple to facilitate memory. Even today we do this, consider the "leaves of three" rule we use for poison ivy and such. Surely this rule is overly broad and includes species that are not harmful.
FWIW, rabbits can be dangerous in the extreme (regular rabbits, not just Monty Python's killer rabbits). They lack certain nutrients and excessive consumption can lead to malnutrition.
Regarding thriving while violating these OT rules. You seem to be referring to populations in Europe and Asia. I specifically stated the OT was a local survival manual. As another poster has pointed out, if you look at the people who thrived in that specific region of the world they did adhere to OT type of rules. Even today in the US deer are safe to eat in many regions, but in some regions scientists and doctors tell hunters not to eat the local deer because of a common local parasite or disease.
But modern science and industrial process does :)
The modern scientific industrial process is to inspect for and discard contaminated meat. The ancient religious practice is to avoid a species likely to be contaminated. I think the difference between these two approaches is not a matter of science, rather a matter of an industrial scale of production. The "prohibition" type of approach of ancient religions is still in use today by scientists and doctors when dealing with smaller scales. For example in certain parts of the US the hunters are told not to eat certain species because of problems with one type of parasite/disease or another.
When in town and picking up USDA inspected meat at the grocery a survival manual is not in mind. However when in a wilderness environment if I screw up and get lost then ancient religious teachings can become a little more relevant. You are quite mistaken about certain knowledge being without value, knowledge is knowledge even if it does not need to be applied every day.
Personally I think its more likely to be there to put the soldier at ease and make him move more quickly and be less fearful about using the weapon. Without such labeling there would be a lot more double and triple checking, and second guessing before actuating the device. Especially in the dark.
How does any of the above change the fact that *some* things in the bible [were] rational and well informed?
The problem is that once these "rational and well informed" rules become part of the religion they become dogma. They become holy words which must not be changed. It doesn't matter if it turns out they were wrong if the first place or if the situation changes. The reason dies and the prohibition lives.
Not necessarily. There are sometimes "reformed" churches who lighten up on rules given scientific progress. For example Reform Judaism believes that some "laws" are really guidelines subject to interpretation rather than literal adherence. On the Christian side you have one church that believes in literal interpretation and that the universe is six thousand or so years old while a different church does world class science in the field of astronomy and who has a priest that developed the big bang theory for the origin of the universe. I think the later (church not priest) once accepted something not far from the former with respect to the age of the universe.
Regarding the proposition that some non-religious people believe epidemics are punishment, yes that is true. A lunatic fringe of that population will say it is mother earth / nature punishing mankind for despoiling the earth.
I'm pretty sure anyone who believes that Mother Nature can punish mankind is religious. They may not be part of your religion, but if they really believe in Mother Nature then they are definitely religious.
To an extent I agree. I see many of the anti-religious posters around here displaying quite religious thought pattens and behaviors. However I think its really about zealotry not religion. A bible thumping fire and brimstone preacher ranting about the wickedness of man and an atheist radical environmental activist ranting about the evils of humanity are quite similar, merely having different polarities on the religiousness meter. While zealotry is often associated with religion I think it exists separately and is the true source of many problems, not religion itself. Many great thinkers and scientists were religious.